Ah, the joys(?) of being struck down with a cold and having nothing to do but read stuff on t’internet. What have I found this week?

Firstly, it’s Hedgehog Awareness Week, so it’s absolutely a good time to think about how we can help this most iconic of prickly creature, who are suffering a huge population decline here in the UK. In my own garden I have a “Hogitat”, a wild area and compost heap for them to snuffle and snooze in and I regularly put out mealworms and special hedgehog food for them. Want to know more about helping hedgehogs? The blog Too Lazy To Weed has you covered with their post Hedgehog Awareness Week: Hog Blog:

“Shallow dishes of water dotted around the garden can be life savers not only for hedgehogs but for all kinds of other creatures…Leaving areas of your garden a bit wild (or very wild in our case) will provide habitat for insects which would be the natural food for hedgehogs. If you wanted to supplement their diet further, then meaty cat or dog food (poultry flavours in jelly would be best), dry cat food or specialist hedgehog food can all be offered. NEVER give them bread or milk.”

Right, onto other things. Somehow this one passed me by when it was first posted, but Beith at Wandering The Woods has an excellent post with an interesting seed-thought about moving beyond a “traditional” male/female polarity model – The Rainbow Dance: Queering the Human Psyche:

“Maybe, instead of saying that we have a fixed gender, it would be more correct to say that each of us has one (or maybe multiple) resonance frequencies that are most likely to become activated by contact with our environment…

For most of us, that resonance frequency will be the one corresponding to the gender of our physical body, though not necessarily for all of us. Or there may be multiple notes we react to, or none at all. Which, for most of us, would mean that we are the gender corresponding to our physical body most of the time, but not necessarily always. And a lot of that will depend on the forces that are at play outside of us, and their interaction.”

“Re-greening a landscape is a reliable way of giving people hope. A dead, dry landscape doesn’t support life and offers humans nothing – except the drama of exposed soil. A green landscape can feed and shelter us, give us respite from the weather and blesses us with beauty. In most parts of the world, planting trees is the way to overcome environmental degradation. We have to plant trees and protect the trees we’ve got, and find ways of living on the land that doesn’t strip life back to the soil.

Humans don’t thrive in sterile environments – be that an urban sprawl, or a landscape we’ve ravaged. We are kinder to each other when we live alongside trees. We thrive in gentler, leafier landscapes.”

Thanks to a comment on my old blogpost Leave the Lawn Alone, I discovered the blog Small Change: Global Problems with Possible Solutions. The writer discusses climate change and ways in which we can help the environment; and has their own post about lawns – Lawn of the Dead: How Cutting your Grass Affects Wildlife. I highly recommend giving it a read, and the rest of the articles on that site too:

“Why do we cut our grass? The short answer is that we think it makes our gardens look neat and respectable. What would the neighbours think if our grass was long and full of weeds? What this kind of thinking fails to consider is the massive toll that lawn mowers have on local wildlife. All ecosystems are fragile and vulnerable to devastating chain reactions. By reducing the diversity of the plants on your lawn, you greatly reduce the hospitability of that environment for insects like bees, beetles and butterflies. This, in turn, has an effect on the food supply available to birds and small mammals. Some animals like mice and hedgehogs are often killed directly by the blades of mowers. On top of all this, most of us cut the grass with either petrol-powered or electric mowers, both of which hasten and intensify climate change, the greatest threat currently facing people and animals alike.”

And finally, thanks to the British Druid Order blog for introducing me to a new band, Alien Weaponry, who are from New Zealand and sing in Te Reo Maori. The blogpost quotes the band as saying:

“If you don’t know your… heritage, you don’t know your whakapapa, you don’t know where you come from… if you don’t know any of that, you’re gonna be lost. We were one of the last indigenous people in the world to be colonised, the ultimate goal of a coloniser is to delete a culture, amalgamate into a single society that doesn’t reflect the indigenous”